Hell tempted me. That’s what they all said.

The red wasteland on which the buildings and tunnels of the university had been built stretched for miles beyond the Pearly Gates. Those who were afraid of it called it the Outside. But I wasn’t afraid.

My apartment was only a Sector away from campus, and there was no way in heck that I was going to wait fifteen minutes for the next subway when I could walk the distance in that time.

So, every day after the buzzer announced the end of the class, I gathered my laptop and locked it in the double seal of my black backpack. I once heard that the computer’s battery could react with the radiation in the Outside and turn into a bomb, so I didn’t want to take any chances. I wasn’t suicidal, even if many would say otherwise.

I was washed down the stairs along with a flood of students. Most of them let themselves through the transparent doors into the domed glass passageways that connected the prideful silver hills of the main buildings. Of course, they weren’t actually glass, but I wasn’t a scientist, so they looked like glass to me. In any case, I broke away from the crowd and disappeared beneath the shadow of the stairs.

There was an emergency exit that had been built into the wall of the building. I liked to think that the emergency exits were put in place for no better reason than to tempt the impatient ones like me to wander to the Outside. Why else would they be there? And they were built dutifully, too, with double doors and a special kind of ventilator in the ceiling that I guessed was supposed to stop the bad air from going into the campus. Similar ventilators were all over the inside of the college, apparently keeping the air safe. It was a state-of-the-art design created by some of the greatest scientist in the world. They had gone to all that trouble, and yet there wasn’t an alarm or anything to keep people from using the stupid emergency doors.

Those people confused me sometimes.

The exit was also glass, like the passageways, with little wires sparkling within the walls around it like jewels. The wires in the hinges flexed as I pushed it open, not making the slightest sound to betray my whereabouts. I let myself through, making sure to close one door before pulling the other open. If the air was contaminated like they said, then I was already doomed, but that didn’t mean that the rest of the students had to suffer my fate. I wasn’t that selfish.

A blast of hot, dry air greeted me as soon as I placed one foot on the red sand. I squinted at the sky. No clouds. Sometimes there were clouds during the winter. There weren’t any anymore.

I let myself out of the campus, allowing the door to fall shut behind me. I never looked back at the door after I had left it. It didn’t look as inviting from the outside as one might think.

I ducked beneath the roof of a house whose walls had been blown away long ago. The college had been built in the middle of the crater that had been left by the first blast, right on top of the ruins. That’s why we could still see the carcasses of the old buildings, skillfully preserved by the dry air and the scorching sun. Some said that it had once been a small city; others believed it to have been nothing more than a town cradled within a forest. Nobody knew the real answer. It had been long forgotten since the war.

Without clouds, the sun felt uncomfortably hot in the Outside, although it didn’t look any different than it did from inside the university. Maybe my brain was just playing with me, because it knew that I was somewhere that was supposed to be dangerous. I could tell myself that there wasn’t anything wrong with the Outside at all, but that couldn’t change the fact that I had always been told otherwise, since the very day that I was born.

I noticed that there were small things were beginning to grow in the hard earth beneath the roof. Red and violet leaves were budding on old, dead-looking stems that pushed against the inside of the roof. A spiny brown flower had opened on one of the vines, its sour little face glaring at the unforgiving ground.

With two fingers, I reached behind the sharp petals and broke the stem. The flower dropped and I ground it into the earth with the sole of my sneaker.

I never liked flowers.

I came to the end of the roof and prepared to dodge to the next section of shade. My usual path, clearly marked upon the sand, led to the right. It wove along the shadows of many fallen trees. Their trunks were their only remaining parts, sticking diagonally out of the sand like neglected gravestones. They had such a wide girth that they must have been at least at least ten or twenty times larger than any living trees I’d ever seen.

But today I noticed that there was another row of tracks, leading away from the university. It, too, followed the shadows of the wreckages.

Another student, I thought, embracing hell.

I hadn’t come across anyone else in the Outside, even if there were lots of stories of students who used it for their own devices. The idea was that even the college police were scared of the Outside, but I doubted it. Most bullies were chickens anyway. They weren’t going to do something if it meant putting their own sorry butts in danger.

Somehow the idea of meeting someone in the Outside appealed to me. Maybe the kid got lost, I contemplated, looking up the slope to where the tracks disappeared beyond the twisted mass of what had once been a metal structure of some kind. But he must’ve known that he was going away from the college. What’s up with that?

Maybe he didn’t plan on coming back, my own mind answered for me. Hesitating, I glanced back at the emergency exit on the other side of the roof. The wires within the glass looked like poisonous tendrils from the outside, waiting to swallow me back in. They can wait, I thought.

With my decision made, I slipped out of the shadow of the roof and followed the lonely tracks away from campus. Whenever they passed under the open sun, I hurried along as quickly as I could without tripping on the red sand.

After following the tracks for several minutes, the hot air began to feel like pressure against my skin and inside my lungs. I didn’t often leave the climate-controlled halls of the campus, so I couldn’t tell if it was merely the heat that was affecting me or if the radiation was beginning to kick in. My t-shirt and jeans, soaking in sweat, clung to me as if attempting to suck out the little air that remained in me. But I was too far from the campus to give up.

Thankfully, the sun soon began to descend below the western edge of the crater. My mouth was dry from the climb, but I didn’t dare to retrieve the bottle of water from my backpack. I would have to open the seal to get it, and that would mean exposing the laptop to the Outside. Being dehydrated sure beat being dead.

The sun was on the verge of disappearing when my eyes finally caught the glimpse of movement above.

I drew closer and saw there was the ruin of a wooden house perched on the crest of the hill’s edge. Its rear end had fallen in and lay ruined, but the front was still intact, looking directly at the setting sun.

From what I could tell, the house looked like one of those old, traditional farmhouses in the textbooks. It had a wide front porch and big windows with shutters, although the windows had all been blown in by the blast so the frames were empty. The edge of the front porch was pointing in my direction, toward the college, and looked like it was on the verge of sliding right down into the valley.

I wasn’t sure if it had been such a good idea to follow the tracks after all.

There was someone on the porch, dressed in a green gown that looked as old as the house. She was leaning against the railing as if she was waiting for me. I didn’t want to go any closer, but I no longer had a choice. It wasn’t my kind of thing to run and hide at the last minute, especially not when I’d already been seen.

I scaled up the rest of the hill to the edge of the porch, the heat of the sun long forgotten. My entire focus was locked on the woman, caught in a terrible place between wonder and disgust.

Her left arm ended just above the elbow and had an edge of black skin the way burnt paper did, with wrinkled skin hanging down around her armpits. Her one remaining hand, resting on the top of the railing, was like a skeleton with fat blue veins bulging over the top. But her face was what made me shiver.

Her left eye appeared to have slid halfway down her face and rested down below the bridge of the nose where her cheek was supposed to be. The eyelid sagged down like a bag, covering most of the eyeball, but not enough so that I couldn’t see it twitch as it moved to follow me. A wisp of gray hair failed to disguise a missing ear behind it.

“Come and sit on the steps,” she said, her voice too human for her appearance, even if it croaked from age.

I didn’t want to do as she said, but I felt as if I had been turned into a puppet. Detached and powerless over my own body, I witnessed as my legs carried me over to the steps of the porch and sat me down on the bottom-most plank.

“This used to be my house,” said the woman after a moment of silence. A flap of skin beneath her chin wobbled as she talked. “That was before the war.”

That’s right, I thought, regaining control of myself after the initial shock of seeing someone so deformed. She must be a victim of the first blast. That must mean that she’s at least sixty years old.

There were few people who still lived to talk about the day that the war began. My mother always said that it was the day that everything ended. It had been thanks to the scientists and their anti-radiation technology that her life and the life of many other children had been spared.

My father had not been so lucky.

“It’s a graveyard,” the woman stated simply, casting a pained look over the crater. “One bomb was all it took. And now the trees are gone, and the deer and the birds. And they didn’t do anything wrong at all.”

“Who was the war between, anyway?” I asked, freeing my tongue.

“Oh, everyone and no one,” was the answer. “In the long run it doesn’t matter who fired the first shot. A lot of lives can be destroyed and it could be the fault of only one person, but that still wouldn’t change the fact that those lives were lost.”

“So? Shouldn’t that person be punished for what they did?” I burst out. “If it’s only the fault of one person, why the hell let them get away with it?”

To my astonishment, the woman laughed. I tried not to look at how her jaw and throat contorted and bounced while it happened. “It doesn’t matter,” she chuckled. “None of it matters at all.”

The woman was starting to confuse me. I couldn’t be sure if she was laughing at me or at some crazy knowledge in her old head.

“I’ll tell you something,” she grunted. “What does this place look like to you?”

I thought about what the other students always called it. The Outside. Outside the campus. The place you never want to be. Hell.

I opened my mouth to answer, but the woman interrupted me with her maniacal laugh. “Hell tempted you,” she said, as if she knew what I was thinking. “Yes, this place is Hell! And those who created it were none other than humans themselves.”

I was speechless. My head started to feel like it was swimming. I wasn’t sure if it was from dehydration or listening to the old woman talk or both.

She sighed heavily and let out a cough that sounded like it came from her stomach. “Now tell me,” she said, “about what is in that shiny black backpack of yours.”

“A… a laptop,” I stammered. “And a water bottle.”

“If you’re afraid about that laptop blowing up in the radiation,” she meant, “you don’t need to worry. You look like you could use a drink from that bottle of yours.”

“Why should I trust you?” I asked, getting to my feet so that I could face her. My fingers were beginning to tremble involuntarily.

“You’re right. Why should you trust me?” she pointed out. “Because, in the long run, it doesn’t matter what happens here. I don’t have anything left. And you, once you realize that you’ve already made a deal with the devil, will realize that you don’t have anything left, either.”

My head began to melt again. I could feel a powerful headache awakening inside it. I might not even be able to get back to the college at this rate, I thought. I wonder if what the old woman said about the laptop is true after all. But, she could just be tempting me. Just like Hell.

“Hurry it up,” she groaned. “If I had a length of rope this would already be over with.”

“What do you mean?” I shook my head, trying to clear it. The devil… rope… all the thoughts started to scramble up. A deal to Hell…

“A rope to hang from,” she said.

I still didn’t understand what she meant with the rope. My head was pounding too loudly, and my shaking fingers strayed to the familiar zipper to the double seal on the backpack.

There was a great loud sucking noise as the contaminated air was drawn toward the laptop. For a second, I saw that the computer turned into a sparkling bright orb. A roar filled my ears, and over the roar was the sound of gleeful laughing. It was then that I finally realized what the old woman had said.

One bomb was all it took.